LOS ANGELES — ACLU of Southern California staff attorney Peter Bibring today criticized the L.A. Police Department's preliminary after-action report about the May 1 action at MacArthur Park. His expanded remarks to the L.A. City Council are below:

"The City of Los Angeles was promised an open and thorough investigation into the LAPD's use of force to disperse a peaceful, permitted assembly on May 1, 2007, at MacArthur Park. The department's preliminary after-action report falls disturbingly short of that promise. In its omissions of the critical facts and failure to address the pivotal questions, the preliminary report threatens to be the first draft of a revisionist history that will gloss over any failures in training, tactics or command and thereby fail to find any need for improvements and reforms.

"The report presented to the Police Commission yesterday purports to address what occurred minute-by-minute, but does not say when or why the LAPD decided to clear the entire park of thousands of peaceful participants, including many families. The report does not mention what training, policy or order could have made officers think they were justified using foam bullets and batons on members of the media whose credentials, microphones, and cameras were obviously displayed, and who were neither resisting arrest nor posing a danger to officers or others. The report did not mention that the dispersal orders were given only in English, not Spanish.

"These are the questions the residents of Los Angeles need answered most, and they were ignored by the Department's report, and would not have been raised but for the questions of Police Commissioners yesterday and Councilmembers today.

"Recent discussion about how many Metro Division officers received crowd-control training, and how recently, obscures a more basic question: How can LAPD officers think that use of force is justified against a person who is responding, in their eyes, too slowly to a dispersal order, but is not resisting arrest and poses no threat to the safety of officers or others? The error evident from videotapes is not advanced crowd control, but basic use of force.

"The constraints on public investigation under the Police Officer's Bill of Rights apply only to investigations by a police department used to determine officer discipline. This need not hamstring transparency in this extraordinary case. The City Council can and should order a fully public investigation — with public testimony, evidence and expert opinion — by an independent body that can be held entirely in the open so long as it is kept walled off from disciplinary proceedings by the Department. The ACLU of Southern California calls on the City Council to deliver the degree of openness that has been promised; it is what this City needs to trust the investigative process and to begin to heal."

LOS ALAMITOS - The Los Alamitos City Council voted unanimously yesterday to settle a lawsuit over its censorship of public-access television programming last year. The city agreed to adopt new policies to protect free speech at Los Alamitos Television Corporation, whose LATV Channel 3 is available to Time Warner customers in Los Alamitos and Rossmoor.

The ACLU of Southern California and the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis LLP filed a free-speech case February 6 on behalf of Alan Katz, whose arts and politics series had an episode ordered off the air.

'With ever-increasing media consolidation, it is harder and harder for individuals to have any access to television and radio. Stations like LATV-3 are a vital outlet for the voices of the public,' said Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU/SC's Manheim Family Attorney for First Amendment Rights. 'This agreement keeps real local television alive in Los Alamitos.'

The new policies are meant to provide fair access to prime time slots and ensure programming is not removed from the air without careful review.

'Producers' shows will air when requested and not be rearranged to suit the city's point of view,' said Katz, who produces 'OC's West End,' an arts and politics program that has aired since February 2005.

The censorship that led to the lawsuit occurred after the City Council fired the independent board of directors who manage the Los Alamitos Television Corporation and took control of the nonprofit station. Katz taped an episode of his series in September 2006 with former LATV board members. The show aired twice before the city manager — who admitted she had not seen the episode — ordered it off the air, citing unspecified 'complaints' about its content. The program was later returned to the air, then pulled again.

The producer of another series taped interviews with City Council candidates before the November election. The episode was swapped for local football games and other programs just before the Nov. 7 election.

LOS ANGELES - Today the ACLU of Southern California asked a judge to evaluate the May 1 actions by the L.A. Police Department's Metropolitan Division in light of the federal consent decree adopted in the wake of the Rampart brutality scandal.

The ACLU/SC requests a hearing with U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess to probe training, reporting and supervision of the Metropolitan Division and explore whether assignment rules that kept senior officers in the elite unit for years fed a warrior culture and code of silence that led to the melee.

On May 1, officers in Metropolitan Division Platoon B wielded batons and fired 150 projectiles into crowds gathered for a peaceful rally. Like the CRASH gang units that committed the Rampart abuses, the elite unit's actions may be the result of 'an insular subculture and strong code of loyalty that makes reporting of misconduct unlikely,' the filing states.

'While the police department has addressed some of the endemic problems exposed by the Rampart investigation, the similarities between Rampart and the actions of police on May 1 are striking,' said ACLU/SC Executive Director Ramona Ripston. 'In both cases, an elite unit seemed to act under its own orders, driven by a warrior culture that tolerates use of excessive force against civilians.'

Police have announced several investigations into the incident, but none will 'specifically confront the questions of the relationship of the Decree to what occurred, examining why the letter and spirit of the Decree were not followed,' the filing states. The court-appointed monitor of the consent decree, Michael Cherkasky, called for a full examination of the Metropolitan Division in his May 15 quarterly report. The ACLU/SC's filing asks the court to give the monitor's inquiry more specific direction.

"There are two federal court orders now in effect, and they didn't stop police on May 1. How did that happen?' asked ACLU/SC Legal Director Mark Rosenbaum, referring to the consent decree and the settlement of the ACLU/SC's lawsuit over police abuse of media during the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

The ACLU/SC successfully argued for a three-year extension of the consent decree in May 2006, citing evidence of racial bias in traffic stops and the department's failure to implement the TEAMS II computer system that tracks officer disciplinary records. The city signed the consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2000 to head off a federal lawsuit, and the ACLU/SC intervened in 2001 to ensure citizens' civil rights are protected.